Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (4 page)

In warm weather the corner of Sands and Navy streets was often the scene of a musical diversion, attended by hundreds. To the accompaniment of an organ grinder named Paolo Scotti, who claimed kinship to the great operatic baritone, and the tinkle of coins falling at his feet, "Signor Tutino Giovanni, Dramatic Tenor," would render Verdi arias. As he sang, he would fix some buxom girl in the crowd with a soulful gaze, clap his left hand over his heart, and stretch out the right in amorous supplication. . . . Capone acquired a passion for Italian grand opera.

Sands Street at night, all night, catered to more robust tastes, as droves of sailors piled ashore, clamoring for liquor and women. It was one of the roughest haunts in the country, the Barbary Coast of the East, where mayhem and murder constantly threatened the unwary. At the pothouse bars that sold raw liquor straight and cheap the thirsty customers lined up three and four deep. If their money ran low, there were pawnshops a step away open all night. There were tattooing parlors, gambling dives, dance halls, fleabags with rooms for rent by the hour, and a galaxy of bangled, painted whores, known by reputation in every port of the seven seas, like the Duchess, and Submarine Mary, who had a mouthful of solid gold teeth.

Capone's schooling began not far from the Sands Street stews at P.S. 7 on Adams Street. His teacher, a sixteen-year-old girl named Sadie Mulvaney, had received her pedagogic training from Catholic nuns, but despite her youth and unworldliness, she managed to enforce order among some of the borough's toughest delinquents. One of them was Salvatore Lucania, better known in later life as Lucky Luciano. He and Al took to each other, and they remained lifelong friends. Miss Mulvaney would remember Al as "a swarthy, sullen, troublesome boy," though no more troublesome than many of her other pupils. He was big and strong for his age, quick to anger, and then murderous. In winter his nose tended to run, a weakness for which his schoolmates, at risk of severe injury, ridiculed him. The fight-loving Irish boys called him Macaroni.

After school hours he liked to loiter on the docks, gazing at such nautical wonders as the Navy's 100-ton floating crane. He never wearied of watching the change of U.S. Marine guards behind the main Navy Yard gate. Many of them were raw recruits still needing elementary drill, and before they could fall out when relieved, they had to mark time in drill formation. If a recruit was out of step, the commanding corporal would keep the entire detail marking time until the blunderer caught on. One afternoon Al, who was then about ten, but looked fourteen, arrived at the gate with several companions. Having observed the routine for weeks, he understood the corporal's strategy. On this occasion there was an exceptionally obtuse guardsman. The detail had been marking time for three or four minutes, and still no light dawned. At length Al yelled at him: "Hey, you long-legged number three there! Get in step! You're holding 'em up." The recruit changed step, and the detail was dismissed. Crimson with shame and anger, the recruit ran up to the gate, making as if to spit at the boy through the bars. Al flew into a rage and, though the recruit was twice as big, challenged him to a fight. The corporal intervened, ordering the recruit back to the guardhouse. You got his goat for sure," he told Al. "But if he really spits on you, I'll put him on report."

"Don't do any reporting," said Al. "Just let the big so-and-so step outside the gate. I'll take care of him." And fists clenched, eyes blazing, he swaggered up and down before his awed companions.

Not long after, discussing the cocky little Italian with the sergeant of the guards, the corporal remarked: "If this kid had a good Marine officer to get hold of him and steer him right, he'd make a good man for the Marines. But if nothing like this will happen, the kid may
drift for a few years until some wise guy picks him up and steers him around and then he'll be heard from one day."

The prophecy came true sooner than the corporal imagined. Capone fell under the influence of a Navy Street Neapolitan gangster seventeen years his senior. John Torrio, born in Naples in 1882, was already an underworld figure of some note. "Terrible John," his followers called him, but more commonly "Little John." He stood no higher than Capone's chest, a pallid, round-faced, button-eyed man, with small, delicate hands and feet. But his size and surface mildness were as deceptive as those of a slumbering pit viper. He had belonged to Manhattan's historic Five Pointers for seven years until that gang of eye-gouging, skull-bashing desperadoes began to vanish into prisons or the grave. He then formed an affiliated gang with headquarters nearby in a saloon he ran on James Street. Torrio was a calm, reflective man. While he had no moral compunctions about murder and would unhesitatingly order the execution of an adversary, he himself shrank from physical violence. He claimed that he had never fired a gun in his life. He had practical objections to violence. He considered it a poor solution to problems of business rivalry. He preferred diplomacy, palaver, alliances. There was, he felt, enough profits in racketeering for all to share peaceably without risking injury or death. In this he anticipated the more sophisticated outlook of the midcentury racket chieftains. Torrio, in his heyday, was the nearest equivalent to a true mastermind criminal outside the pages of detective fiction, and he enormously influenced the policies and tactics of his younger friend and protege. "I looked on Johnny like my adviser and father," said Capone in middle age, "and the party who made it possible for me to get my start."

In 1907 the Capones moved to another Italian community about a mile south of Navy Street. They squeezed themselves, eight of them, into a flat on the second story of a two-story cold-water tenement at 38 Garfield Place. The oldest son, James, had meanwhile vanished at the age of sixteen, and many years would pass before his family learned what had happened to him.

Torrio became a figure as familiar to Capone in the new neighborhood as he had in the old, for on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Union Street, above a restaurant within sight of Garfield Place, he started a "social club" with the name in gilt letters on the windows: THE JOHN TORRIO ASSOCIATION. Capone passed it every day going to and from school.

He entered the second grade at P.S. 113 on Butler Street, a sixblock walk from his home. Up to the sixth grade he maintained a B average. He then fell behind in arithmetic and grammar, mainly because of truancy, and he had to repeat the grade. That year, his fourteenth, his attendance dropped to thirty-three days out of a possible ninety. When a teacher reproved him, his volcanic temper erupted, and he struck her. Thrashed by the principal, he quit school, never to return. He worked sporadically first as a clerk in a candy store at 305 Fifth Avenue, next as a pinball setter in a bowling alley, then as a paper and cloth cutter in a bindery. There was a poolroom at 20 Garfield Place where Capone father and son both played and Al became the neighborhood champion.

He could not roam very far from home without crossing territory overrun by bellicose, adolescent street gangs. Any stranger was apt to arouse their hostility, a reaction that reflected the prejudices of their elders. The easterly stretch of Flushing Avenue, near Capone's former home, was unhealthy for Neapolitans, being a Sicilian stronghold. Vicious knife fighters, the Sicilian gangs had adapted to Brooklyn street combat the ancient island practice of disfiguring an enemy, particularly an informer. They would slit his face from eye to ear. This "rat" work became so widely recognized as a Sicilian practice that non-Sicilian gangs took to imitating it after felling their prey in order to divert suspicion from themselves. Not that the other Italian gangs were benign. They, too, fought with knives to maim and sometimes to kill.

Northwest, up to the Navy Yard wall, the Irish predominated. To them, especially those who worked on the docks where their leaders strove to monopolize the labor market, the hungry "greasers" were cheap competition, threatening their livelihoods. The preferred weapons of the Irish gangs were fists, bricks and stones, hauled to the field of battle in onion sacks. For shields they used covers filched from garbage cans.

The Jews, occupying territory northeast, in the Williamsburg section, despised the Italian for what they considered his excessive individualism and lack of social consciousness, which left him indifferent to group efforts toward the general betterment. The Jewish gangs, however, showed less belligerence than most. Dread exceptions were the Havemeyer Streeters, who waged implacable warfare against all Gentile gangs. They repeatedly smashed the windows of the Williamsburg Mission for Jews because it sought to convert Jews to Christianity.

Street gangs proliferated in every slum of every city, and the greater the foreign influx, the more numerous the gangs. They were a symptom of the disorganization that afflicted so many uprooted families. In the small towns and rural villages from which the majority came society was stable, changeless, stratified, its traditions and code of conduct long fixed and unchallenged. Whatever problem might confront the head of the family, there were time-hallowed precedents to guide him. But in the maelstrom of the vast, everexpanding American metropolis, with its continual swift changes, its ebb and flow of polyglot masses, its ethnic collisions, the old, familiar standards were unavailing. The baffled parents were hard put to comprehend their children's needs, let alone to respond to them, and as a result they lost authority. They could no longer command their children's unquestioning obedience, no longer control them. The breach widened as the children learned the language and the strange, new American ways, while the parents stubbornly clung to their Old World values.

The daily abrasions of tenement life further eroded family unity. What boy would want to linger an instant longer than necessary where eight, ten, twelve people ate and slept, washed and dressed in two or three dank, dingy rooms, where the fetor of excrement from rotten drains filled the hallways and vermin feasted on the garbage dumped out of windows, where you either froze or sweltered, where the grown-ups, in their distress and bewilderment, constantly screamed at one another and at you and whipped you for the least offense?

The street gang was escape. The street gang was freedom. The street gang offered outlets for stifled young energies. The agencies that might have kept boys off the street, the schools and churches, lacked the means to do so. Few slum schools had a gym or playground or any kind of after-class recreation program. The average teacher was badly trained, unimaginative and chronically irritable, and the curriculum deadly dull. Still less were the churches equipped to provide activities that might have competed with the lure of the streets, and religion as taught in the slum parishes failed to reach the young.

They formed their own street society, independent of the adult world and antagonistic to it. Led by some older, forceful boy, they pursued the thrills of shared adventure, of horseplay, exploration, gambling, pilfering, vandalism, sneaking a smoke or snuff or alcohol, secret ritual, smut sessions, fighting rival gangs. In his classic study of 1,313 Chicago boys' gangs, Frederic Thrasher quoted a member of the Bimbooms as follows:

"When I first moved into the neighborhood I met two brothers who took me one night with the rest of the gang-about thirteen boys eleven to twenty-two years old. We stayed out till nine, pitching pennies on the corner. They showed me their hang-out up in a barn, where there was an electric light, and we began to stay out till two or three every morning.

"We used to bring up pop and candy to eat, and play cards. It was a big room, with furniture and everything. The people had stored an old dining-room set, a library table, a kitchen table, and an army bed up there. It was not really a club, just a hang-out. Some of the big fellows got to bossing it, and we called them the 'Bimbooms.' Then they called the whole gang the 'Bimbooms.'

"We loved baseball and sometimes we would all play hooky from school to go to a game. When we had our own team, we called it the 'Congress Athletic Club.'

"On the corner, we would pitch pennies and then it got to be quarters. We played Rummie and Seven-and-a-half for money. I wanted to learn how to play Stud-poker, but no one would teach me. Oftentimes we shot dice for pocket-trash. Sometimes when we were hollering and playing games, the flying-squad would chase us away. The horse-cop would run us like anything, but we were too fast for him. Then he'd throw his club and we'd throw it back again at his horse's feet to make him prance. We'd call him 'Old Mickey Cop.'

"In the wintertime, we'd hitch boards to street cars, and it was a lot of fun to see the fellows hit a switch and get spilled off. I never liked to go to Union Park with the family, but to go with the gang on the 'L' platform and blow up pigeons through their beaks or smash stolen eggs in the kids' pockets.

"We used to keep pretty much to ourselves, and if another gang got fresh with us, a couple of guys would go down and get the Winchesters to come up and help us. One gang of fifteen or sixteen kids would try to run us off our corner just to be smart. They had a double-barreled shotgun which they would load with rock salt. And when it hit you, would it hurt! You tell 'em, boyl

"We built a fort in a vacant lot on the corner to keep them from shooting us. Then they'd throw rocks and knock the boards off, so they could hit us. They would usually come around raiding about three times a week. We had beebee guns and a 22-rifle, in which we shot blanks to scare them, but we might have shot something else if we'd had it."

The supreme thrill-and an activity important to the cohesion of the gang-was fighting. The captains would stake out a block or two as their gang's domain and declare war on any other gang that attempted to set foot inside the boundaries. Or they would mount a raid against a rival gang's territory.

"Jimmie, the leader of the gang, is a bad actor. He would kill a policeman, if necessary, to get away. Most of the bunch are getting rounded up now, on account of their robbing expeditions. The greatest spirit of the gang is fighting and Jimmie would lead the boys to battle on the least pretext.